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University of Virginia Library

Nature-notes and impressions in prose and verse

Cawein, Madison Julius (1865-1914)

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[Would I could talk as the flowers talk]

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NATURE-NOTES and IMPRESSIONS

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[Lead me, thou Bard of Beauty, through those caves]

[O let me sing as thou didst, Keats, and die]

[In the forest of music often and often]

[When winter nights are cold and shrill]

[The roar of winter through the palsied oaks]

[I've wooed soft sleep all night]

[With its helm of silver and spur of gold]

[By the willow copse near the river shore]

[O wilding of the young, young June]

[When all the orchards faded lie]

[The moon is a lemon petal]

[Deep down, deep down, deep, deep, deep]

[Come, kiss me, beautiful Death]

[Cheerily rang the bugle horn]

[And now yon crystal mount of clouds]

[The broad Ohio's darkening stream]

[O wind of eve, what spices, steeped]

[When eve casts on the day's dark bier]

[O my Kentucky, forest old!]

[A distant river glimpsed through deep-leaved trees]

[No more for me shall gray-robed Dawn look through]

[I saw sweet Summer go]

[When the jeweled lights of the fireflies gleam]

[Thus in the dusk as ghosts they met]

[In dimly lighted cloisters of the heart]

[Amid the summer fields and flowers]

[Keep thou my face engraven in thine heart]

[One milk-white hand she stretched to me]

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[Now that the dawn is up, is up]

[Dark woodland ways of drowsy rustlings]

[The thunder boomed from cloudy ridge to ridge]

[Who now hath understood]

[High up she glides, high up, the quartz-white moon]

[The hope, the hate, the bitterness of love]

[Barbaric burgonets, heavy with gems]

[Thou hast no thought for one who walks 'mid flowers]

[Thou art to me the whole of heaven]

[Two unshed tears made beautiful her eyes]

[Oh, for the gods of the Greeks]

[A languid land of lazy moons and stars]

[The haymakers' sickles]

[She whom I loved too well]

[Tell me, do you love to lie]

[What gladness of the young, young Earth]

[Maid Marian rose in the morn betime]

[Look at me over your shoulder, lass]

[Oh, could I only grieve you]

[You who would not have me]

[Dim gleam and gloom]

[Along the west a cloud-wrought crimson cloth]

[What of the sea when the storm clouds thicken]

[Between the meads of millet]

[Her eyes were dark with the darkness of hell]

[Night came, treading the darkness into burning stars]

[On the sunset's cloudy tide]

[Alas! how hearts go groping]

[Why is it thus with me as days go by]

[Swift as the poplar, with its lordly height]

[While lone I stood]

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[A vagabond foot and a vagabond road]

[As, all distraught, with dark, neglected hair]

[The milkweeds nod their Rip-Van-Winkle heads]

[In the Garden of Skulls and Serpents]

[The pure precision of a star, a flower]

[I have listened long unto the promises]

[I saw the Spring go by, her mouth a thread]

[An Eldorado of vales and peaks]

[A rune of glimmer and a scrawl of light]

[The deep blue spike of the great lobelia glows]

[I gazed upon the wasted lips of Want]

[Green in the circle of contingent trees]

[On every side the roses rise]

[The shadows where no light looked through]

[With all my heart I deem it no great folly]

[What bird is that that sings so long]

[The sunset lets its heavy curtains down]

[These are the cups of Comus]

[Yea; death behind her, gazing through her hair]

[The blue wild hyssop, with its dewy mouth]

[Drab-colored seed pods of the autumn hung]

[A poet's soul 's unconscious of its dreams]

[The bright half moon, a boat pearl-white]

[When earth forgets one flower that comes with spring]

[All night it rained. Now in the dawn]

[I love to linger o'er the roseless rose]

[The auroral scent of morning lilies blows]

[As I went riding toward the sea]

[Clung o'er with cockle-burrs and thorny seeds]

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[There was an old frog]

[So let Noon lead me till at last she reaches]

[Above the hills the sunset's rolled]

[The bloodroot leaves of middle March]

[Croppings out of unmined gold]

[Moist, rocky places of the spring]

[The hairy stems of the hepatica]

[Deep in the leaves' concealing green]

[The dewberries are blooming now]

[Purple the hills stretch under purple mists]

[Hark how the honey-throated thrush]

[The ground is strewn with the dead oak-bloom]

[That little worm shall become a fly]

[Invite my soul to rest awhile]

[The smell of tannin in the ozoned air]

[The stealthy squirrel skips along]

[Yesterday among the beeches, to-day among the oaks]

[The wind is rising and the leaves are blown]

[The dawn comes in clad all in hodden gray]

[Hylas, that pipe the little buds awake]

[Still are the forests barren of all buds]

[Come, let us forth and homage her]

[My mind's washed clean by the wind that brings]

[The wind goes groping among the trees]

[The sluggish snake now basks his uncoiled length]

[Rocked by the winds of March the trees become]

[The gold-green blooms of the spicebush burn]

[Placid and pure and clean the wild-phlox blooms]

[Who is it knows]

[The liquid note of the thrush—what words can describe it]

[The woodpecker! hear him, the redcapped]

[The crawfish in his tower of ooze and clay]

[Hag-tapers bow their heads i' the wind]

[Here where the twilight-colored trunks of trees]

[Silvered with sun and rain the hills and vales]

[The old tree, on which the man was hanged, sighed to itself]

[Where like an angry tyrant roars the sea]

[What boots it to keep saying]

[Until we meet again]

[Where bloomed the rose but yesterday]

[The climbing cricket clings]

[My soul is sick of many things]

[Ah, not in vain]

[A thin fall rain]

[Ephemeral gold]

[The scarlet and the gold and bronze]

[Ochre-colored broom-sedge]

[In the forest by the rain-wild creeks]

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“WHEN SPRING COMES DOWN THE WILDWOOD WAY”

HILDA OF THE HILLSIDE

DAWN IN THE ALLEGHANIES

AUTUMN ETCHINGS

THE CHARCOAL-BURNER'S HUT

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[The old tree, on which the man was hanged, sighed to itself]

The old tree, on which the man was hanged, sighed to itself:—
“Alas! why am I made an instrument of violent death?
What have I done that I should be so punished?
Made a participant in such a crime?
I, whose life has evermore been one of peace and love:
Whose mind has ever been employed with thoughts of mercy:
Whose arms have always been stretched forth
In kindness and protection,
Sheltering the baby blossoms,
The shy, the tender, the timid,
The wild things of the woods,
That love to nestle and lie at my mossy foot:
I, whose limbs have unselfishly made,
Year after year,
A quiet cirque of coolth and comfort for the weary traveler,
Hot and dusty from the road,

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Refreshing and restoring him with the soothing whisper,
The lullabying lilt of my leaves:
My verdurous bosom the home and haunt of unstudied song,—
Birds and breezes rejoicing in its sheltering and maternal amplitude.
Ah me! henceforward will Beauty and Love avoid me,
Frequent visitors before!
And Fear and Hate tenant in my boughs.
The Dryad, who dwelt in my heart,
Its beautiful and innocent inhabitant, is fled away.
No more will the loveliness of things within me and about me
Be as it was before.
Accursed am I among trees!
Accursed with the curse of murder!
The contact and contamination of crime!
Accursed with the stigma of slaughter!
And accursed shall I ever remain through the crime of man,
The most cruel, the most destructive, the most ferocious of all animals.
Would now that some devastating bolt,

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Blindingly launched from yonder approaching cloud,
Might fell me, thunderingly, to earth!
Making me really that which I feel that I am become—
A horrible thing, twisted and gnarled and black,
Hideously crippled and scarred,
Blasted and branded, as the brow of Cain,
With withering, with elemental fire:
Laying me prone; or leaving a towering and tortured trunk,
A blackened shape,
In the shuddering and rejecting forest—
A trysting place for Murder,
A roost for obscene things,
Buzzards, carrion-crows, and owls.”